By: Shari Dalton
My friend Kay Slane of Highway Hypodermics was on Facebook the other day, and she had made a comment that the trust between healthcare recruiters and traveling healthcare professionals is at an all-time low these days. I couldn’t agree more. It’s actually kind of depressing!
I started out in a pre-social media world of recruiting and things were much different back then. As recruiters, we couldn’t just hop on social media and creep on someone’s profile to see what kind of traveler they may be. We had to rely on good old-fashioned phone conversations to tell us if a candidate was someone we wanted to grow old with.
And the same held true for travelers! They had to find a few agencies and put in hours of leg work calling around until they found a few recruiters that they could trust to help them meet their career goals.
Ahhh, the good old days! And now, here we are – access to information at our fingertips and beyond our wildest dreams. Social media has helped recruiters and travelers connect in ways they never could before and on a much deeper level, partly because you can finally put faces with the names.
But, you know what they say; it’s a blessing and a curse. For all the good it has done, it’s also done a lot of damage. Opinions, right or wrong, flow from the fingertips at light speed. Misinformation is shared, words are manipulated, names get called, feelings get hurt…and just like that, there’s a divide. It’s like Mark Zuckerberg came down from the promised land and parted the seas like Moses himself.
And here we are, an industry that was once built on the premise of and for the good of patient care is now lost in a world of Team Us VS Team Them. And nowhere is anyone talking about why we’re all here to begin with – the patients. We’re too busy being more transparent than the next guy, or hell-bent on creating a world of “fairness” and “good deals”.
If you’re still reading this, and you want my honest opinion, pick up the phone and start talking with one another. Stop hiding behind your keyboards and opinions. Stop believing that you are any better than the next. We are all human; we are all capable of doing really great things and being really great people. It’s quite amazing when you put your guard down for a minute and can just talk, about something or nothing at all.
I’m not saying you should get off social media, but you have a choice in who you want to spend your time with. You have a choice of who you want to follow and engage in conversations with. You have a choice to believe everything that is written, or explore and learn and grow with your own understanding of how things work in this crazy world. And you can choose to be content and happy or hop on the struggle bus with all the other Negative Nellies.
There are really (and I mean REALLY) good recruiters out there. And there are travelers that I would trust with my daughter’s life. Find each other and treat each other well, and stop worrying about what the rest of the world thinks!
